Sunday, December 07, 2014

The Marvelous Maps of the Week

Eric Fischer at Mapbox has mapped 6 billion geo-tagged Twitter messages. The 6 Billion Tweets Map
is a great visualization of Twitter's global appeal, not only showing where
Twitter is popular but also where the social network has
yet to gain traction.

Mapping 6 billion Tweets is quite a technical achievement. If you
are interested in how Eric was able to manage mapping so much data on
one map then you should read his Mapbox blog post
on how he created the map. In particular you might be interested in a
new tool which Eric has developed for making vector tiles from large
data sets, called Tippecanoe.

Bath is a beautiful city, full of beautiful Georgian buildings. It also now has a beautiful historical map website.

I've seen a lot of historical map websites and History Map: Bath
stands out as one of the better designed visualizations of old maps.
This Leaflet.js created map allows you to view eight historical maps of
the city, ranging from the 1500′s through to the 1940′s.

The site allows you to view the historical maps on top of the modern map
of Bath using a magnifying glass lens overlay. Alternatively you can
switch to view each of the historical maps in full-screen mode. A map
inset also provides a little information on each of the historical map
overlays

One of the prettiest looking maps this week was this animated map of Flights Over Queens. This CartoDB created map is a great visualization of flight patterns over New York City.

The map animates flights on the evening of October 1st 2014 coming into
and exiting JFK, LGA and EWR. The map also shows the flight paths of
each of the evening's flights. The result is a rather beautiful map of
flight patterns over the city.